[RndTbl] Motherboard and hardware suggestions for servers?

Shawn Wallbridge shawn at synack-hosting.com
Tue May 4 13:41:22 CDT 2004


One thing to consider is that Intel boards (made by Intel, that is) 
have an excellent next day warranty replacement. We use the Intel 
SE7501BR2 server board and it is excellent, but quite expensive.

As for hard drives, I would recommend using a 3Ware SATA RAID 
controller, but that's just me.

Depending on your needs, you could look at a used Sun server off eBay. 
I recently purchased a Sun Enterprise450 (quad proc, up to 4GB Ram, 20 
HD's) for $500CAN on eBay. The Sun U2 is really nice, as is the 
U30/U60.

One way to use cheap IDE disks on a Sun is get an Arena drive box from 
Maxtronics (they are on eBay all the time) and it does internal RAID, 
but connects to the machine via SCSI. They are very nice, we have 4 of 
them. You can get the 8 drive one for $600US. It actually works out to 
be about the same cost as buying a 3Ware controller.

shawn

On 4-May-04, at 1:18 PM, John Lange wrote:

> Hello all. I was hoping one of you server types would have a suggestion
> for a motherboard that would be suitable for use in a server.
>
> Up until now I've built all my machines (including servers) using
> "off-the-shelf" hardware purchased from CBIT and it has worked great 
> for
> me. I've been doing it this way for a long time and I've never had any
> significant problems.
>
> Now I'm looking to build another box and I'm wondering what a good
> choice of hardware would be.
>
> This box will have at least 1G of RAM and I would like it to have 4 
> SATA
> hard drives doing some kind of software RAID.
>
> I'd _like_ dual processors but I'm not willing to quadruple the price 
> of
> the system just to get it which is also the reason why I've never
> considered purchasing any of the ready made "server" systems from the
> likes of Dell, Sun, or IBM. I just don't have the budget for it.
>
> I'm really interested in opinions from other sever admins as to what 
> you
> use for your boxes.
>
> Thanks.
>
> -- 
> John Lange
> BigHostBox.com
> (204) 885 0872
>
> _______________________________________________
> Roundtable mailing list
> Roundtable at muug.mb.ca
> http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable




More information about the Roundtable mailing list